First Impressions?

[ww1971]

Despite yesterday’s position on not going to install big sur, I had a change of heart. i then downloaded the update on my intel MacBook Pro 2020 13” and when the update was downloaded I found out that Dropbox was stalling the installation procoss, I closed Dropbox and the installation went smoothly after a few hiccups. Once installed it looked like a iPad OS with similar icons to iPad OS with proper multitasked windows and menus on it. Anyway I tested all existing 3rd party applications, all ran fine even Dropbox and blender. I had not had any problems with it It all ran fine and seamlessly

 

[ww1971]

Really have you looked and ever used Windows 10 lately.

i‘d take Mac os big sur anyday over windows. I strongly dislike windows 10.because it used to crash a lot when I boot camped on my old iMac. The best thing I got rid of windows 10 and the Mac ran better

 

[mcdawg]

I hated Catalina from the very get-go. It was a sick joke of a OS, riddled with bugs and plagued by crashes.

Big Sur, I so far really like. I agree with all the aesthetic critiques and approvals I’ve read thus far, which is to say, it’s hit and miss there: much of it I like, but don’t think it’s necessarily all coherent. I do dig the new system sounds, though. I couldn’t list all the exact changes there, but whenever I do hear a system sound now, I am each time surprised at how much more pleasing it is that the corresponding Catalina sound would have been.

But most of all, it’s been rock-solid, smooth, and stable for me on both a 2019 MB Air and a 2019 iMac. And most noticeable of all is how so very much faster Photos is, especially on the MB Air, which needs to keep most of my 90,000+ photos in the cloud due to space considerations - under Catalina, even with a 300+ mb/s connection, each photo would load realllly slowly, whereas under BS, cloud-stored photos are now loading and displaying almost instantaneously. Huge, huge, massive improvement there.

So far, 👍👍

 

[myrtlebee]

Overall, I like it. Getting used to the rounded corners and new icons. AirPods autoswitching isn't working reliably for me, I don't care for the smaller text in the menu bar, and not thrilled with some of the new system sounds, but other than that it seems fast and operates smoothly. Seems crisp and fresh from a design standpoint. I do see this as a step towards merging iPadOS and MacOS. You can see the steady shift towards a more touch friendly interface.

 

[timelessbeing]

I think I understand now ... the brightly colored wallpaper ... the funhouse sound effects ... the toy icons ... it's a CIRCUS theme!

 

[Prorege1]

Day two with Big Sur, snappy and a fresh design. Very odd, but my Ubiquiti router & 1gb internet download speed also increased by 30 Mbps since updating

 

[wim.v]

I do like the visual update quite a lot to be honest.

 

[tkwolf]

I love the aesthetics but it does not feel very fluid. I am on a 2020 MBA intel

 

[elite953]

Well I have been using it for last 12 hours. my experience so far is smooth. But i faced bluetooth connectivity issue with my bose QC 35ii headphones. the sound was muffled, low, less bass. Then I rectified it somehow. Vuze torrent client is not working and incompatible.
Battery life is also okay and i am not facing any battery drain issue. My daily productivity apps are also running without any delays. I have felt that mac OS Big Sur is like 20-25% faster than Catalina,
I will give my detailed review after 1 week usage

 

[shafez]

Really have you looked and ever used Windows 10 lately.

We are not comparing macOS design to Windows here, Apple to Apple.

 

[Feyl]

I hated Catalina from the very get-go. It was sick joke of a OS, riddled with bugs and plagued by crashes.

Big Sur, I so far really like. I agree with all the aesthetic critiques and approvals I’ve read thus far, which is to say, it’s hit and miss there: much of it I like, but don’t think it’s necessarily all coherent. I do dig the new system sounds, though. I couldn’t list all the exact changes there, but whenever I do hear a system sound now, I am each time surprised at how much more pleasing it is that the Catalina sound would have been.

But most of all, it’s been rock-solid, smooth, and stable for me on a 2019 MB Air and a 2019 iMac. And most noticeable of all is how so very much faster Photos is, especially on the MB Air, which needs to keep most of my 90,000+ photos in the cloud due to space considerations - under Catalina, even with a 300+ mb/s connection, each photo would load realllly slowly, whereas under BS, cloud-stored photos are now loading and displaying almost instantaneously. Huge, huge, massive improvement there.

So far, 👍👍

I also have a 2019 Air but I see zero improvements in performance. Quite the opposite. The whole system is a little bit slower and the UI feels slugish.

 

[Don MC]

Textedit: Whenever you paste something in Textedit, it jumps around like crazy and put you somewhere out of focus.

Textedit: Searching in Textedit is not working as it should.

Noticed that. That's a big fat bug right there. When I paste something in Textedit, it jumps right up to the top of the page.

 

[INoctilux]

Installed it on a MBP 16", i9, 16gb :

- Really performance backdrop : I hope that Apple is not playing us again by optimizing this OS for the ARM and by doing that pressing the actual Intel users to update their machine to get decent performances (#IPhone-battery-reminiscence).

- The system is "nice" but the icons are, in my opinion, incredibly ugly.

 

[ArPe]

I’m not seeing any performance loss and every benchmark for every hardware component and app are the same as Catalina.

I see this often, do clean installs and maintain a clean system and clean disk. I am aware most people don’t know how to do this, but they just need to ask.

 

[skiabox]

Mixed feelings.
It seems to handle in a better way the underlying hardware (macbook pro 17) although beach balls are back and they may appear even when you are writing a post in a forum!

 

[Marbles1]

Having used Big Sur for a day or two - I find the new interface looks 'ok' on a 13" laptop screen, but is awful on a big external monitor.

It's as if they didn't bother testing it on this scenario.

The chunky tool bars / white space / gaps between icons are such a waste of space. And Finder feels a bit janky / like it's somehow off or been rebuilt by a different team of developers and doesn't feel right.

A strange release, really. It feels like a pirated knock off of macOS.

 

[macdos]

There is a "notification" that tells me to take a "tour" of "Big Sur". The options are to take it, or to take it later. There is no option to not take it.

We are getting aggravated now.

 

[CLS7]

How many people here are thinking about buying a Windows PC now?

 

[thingstoponder]

This still floods the logs: com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (com.apple.mdworker.shared.06000000-0200-0000-0000-000000000000[7004]): Service exited due to SIGKILL | sent by mds[78]. You would think Apple would tend to such bugs, but…

Imovie adds further flooding: VTDecoderXPCService[6997]: DEPRECATED USE in libdispatch client: Changing target queue hierarchy after xpc connection was activated; set a breakpoint on _dispatch_bug_deprecated to debug

Books doesn't have a toggle for list/grid anymore, you have to go to the menu FAR away in the left corner of the screen.

Books added a lot of menus for Store. I don't use the store, and I can't get rid of the crap.

But there is a Polish-English dictionary, although yet not a Greek-English one.

Round icons. More air.

No new fonts.

No new apps.

Not faster.

Not more memory efficient.

Probably many more emoji. I don't know. I don't care.

That's what we get for 12.1 GB worth of data.

You realize the 12GB replaces to the old stuff right? It’s not 12GB bigger.

 

[macdos]

You realize the 12GB replaces to the old stuff right? It’s not 12GB bigger.

Right. But those 12 GB don't contain anything new, it is an empty download.

 

[macdos]

How many people here are thinking about buying a Windows PC now?

There are just Macs and PCs. Windows is an operating system. I'll probably go for Ubuntu when I'm fed up with Apple, which is bound to be very soon.

 

[MalcolmJID]

I bought a second-hand Late-2013 MBP to replace an Early-2011 MBP so I could get an OS upgrade, get a retina display etc. I think the combination of getting a Retina display and jumping from High Sierra to Big Sur has been a very pleasant experience indeed. I quite like the aesthetic of the OS, though I think we'll see a couple of elements tweaked over the next couple of point releases.

 

[pshufd]

I think that it's very nice. I'm running it on a virtual machine at QHD resolution and will try it out for a week. If I like it, then I will stick with it. I will take my time upgrading my old MacBook Pros to ensure that I don't lose any 32-bit programs. If it turns out that I have 32-bit programs that I need to run, then I will leave those old systems on Mojave or use a Mojave Virtual Machine.

 

[INoctilux]

I’m not seeing any performance loss and every benchmark for every hardware component and app are the same as Catalina.

I see this often, do clean installs and maintain a clean system and clean disk. I am aware most people don’t know how to do this, but they just need to ask.

My system is optimized (few files and daily optimization with Clean My Mac).

 

[Dr. McKay]

I installed it on my MB Pro (2015 i7, 512Gb SSD, 16Gb or RAM, Radeon R9 M370X) and it's snappier than Catalina. I like the UI as well, so except for the problem with Apple Music (which seems to be widespread so there's bound to a solution soon), I'm happy with it.
Not installing it on my main computer, a 27 inch iMac yet, though. Going to wait until version 11.1 for that...